MSGF Finance Seminar - Love and Finance

Organized by the HKUST-NYU Stern MS in Global Finance Program

How we actually behave – and at least three recent Nobel Prizes – often contradict what our college Economics professors taught us about how people are supposed to behave, in various aspects of our lives including in financial decision making. Behavioral finance combines the latest findings from psychology with the basic logic of conventional economics and finance to provide a more realistic perspective on such behavior. In behavioral finance, we examine how human psychology affects the way we behave, while paying attention to practical applications for investment management and corporate decision making.

In this session, Prof Abhiroop Mukherjee will introduce behavioral finance more formally, and examine a few mistakes we make that are common to our romantic and financial lives:

• What is behavioral finance, and how does it differ from rational finance?
• Three lessons from psychology – specifically, from Daniel Kahneman and AmosTversky’s Nobel Prize-winning Prospect Theory – about how we behave when it comes to love and money

1. Reference Dependence
2. Loss Aversion
3. Probability Weighting

 Speaker

Professor Abhiroop Mukherjee is an Associate Professor of Finance at HKUST.  Professor Mukherjee joined HKUST in 2010 after receiving his PhD in Economics from Yale University, where he worked under the supervision of Professors Nicholas Barberis, Andrew Metrick, and Robert Shiller (Nobel Laureate, 2013). He studies issues related to behavioral and institutional finance, and his research has been published in all of the three top academic journals in finance.

Professor Mukherjee has received recognition for both teaching and research, and some of his work has been used in applied settings by Investment Funds, Central Banks and Policy Think Tanks, both in Asia and in the U.S.

Schedule

1830 - 1900    Registration and Light Lunch
1900 - 1905    Welcome and Introduction
1905 - 1945    Presentation
1945 - 2000    Q&A